Agile is...

There are many definitions of “agile” floating around. The reason for this is because “agile” itself is fluid and flexible, adapting itself to the organization into which it is introduced.

Here at AgileXcellence, we believe that providing the highest business value is a core goal of agile. In order to achieve the highest business value, we follow the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Guiding Principles of Agile.

As the Agile Manifesto speaks to agile development, AgileXcellence extends the manifesto to creating agile organizations through enterprise transformation. Since a core tenet of the Agile Manifesto is close collaboration between the business side and the development side, all touch points along the way need to embrace and practice agility in order for the entire organization to be successful.

On agile development teams, when one person fails, the entire team fails. This is also true in an agile organization.

Many Forms of Agile

There are many different frameworks and practices under the agile development umbrella. The most prevalent framework is scrum, though there is also kanban, test driven development, eXtreme Programming (XP), and a host of other frameworks and engineering practices.

When applied as an agile organization, the goals of increasing business value, constant improvement, iterative and incremental delivery of high quality working product, and “just enough” processes are observed and measured.

Every company is different and the solution that works best for your organization will be specific to your organization. However, this solution will be baselined so that maximum efficiencies are gained across the organization from using a common tool kit, so to speak.

Agile Development or Agile Organization

Agile development constantly looks for new ways to improve software development. Key to this is the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

As there is value in the items on the right side, agilists value the items on the left more.

But wait…does your organization do software development and absolutely nothing else? No marketing, no sales, no customer service? Probably not. Even in a software development company, there are many other activities that support development. That’s why you need to consider extending agile to the entire organization.